Adobe Reader 7 for Linux

Unfortunately it’s still x86-only — no AMD64 or PowerPC versions are available. Linux users on non-x86 architectures maybe should send them feature requests and bug reports until they extend their support to those architectures.

2 Comments

You do know that the x86 version runs just fine on x86-64 systems right? It’s not like a 64 bit version of the program will run faster or otherwise work better. Generally, 64 bit gui programs are a mistake as all the supporting libraries need to be 64 bit as well (gtk, motif, gnome, whatever other toolkits are being used, etc.)

Yes, it works. (Except for the plug-in which will have trouble with 64-bit browsers.)

I would agree with your statements on most 32/64-bit systems but not on x86-64. Longmode has quite a few performance related enhancements compared to 32-bit mode, for instance:

Twice as many GPRs and SSE registers

FP operations use SSE by default (you can’t use SSE unconditionally in x86 code if you have to keep backward compatibility)

Better calling convention (most parameters passed in registers)

Note that none of these improvements are really advantages of 64-bitness, they just happen to be available only in x86-64’s longmode.

The disadvantages of 64-bit systems (larger code size, higher memory footprint) are negligible on x86-64. I’ve done quite a few comparisons while porting HotSpot to x86-64, the overhead was pretty small in almost all cases.

On x86-64 all distributions go for a complete 64-bit userland with a 32-bit compatibility environment due to the advantages of longmode. 64-bit mode on other architectures (e.g. ppc64) doesn’t have similar advantages, so most distributions have a mostly 32-bit userland on these.

Anyhow, I don’t care much about an x86-64 version of acrobat but I would appreciate a ppc version.